Newsletters from Raccoon Forks Farms

Happy September! Are you as muddy as we are, now? We’ve had a lot of rain recently, but the vegetables are liking it, so we are, too! We hope you’ve been getting just enough rain, and not too much.

At our Runnells farm, we’re keeping up with the chickens and eggs, and continuing to work on our goat fencing! If you were receiving these newsletters last summer, you’ll recall that we spent quite a bit of time fencing our new, big chicken pasture. We grow fences at Runnells!

At our Redfield farm, this week, we’re planting lettuce and bunching onions in our high tunnel, for harvesting later this fall. We’re also starting to harvest some of our pumpkins and winter squash! Our squash have been doing really well this year, and we’re looking forward to bringing you some big, beautiful butternuts and other winter squashes.

It’s transition time! That mixed time of year when many human activities suggest autumn – the State Fair’s come and gone, school’s back in session – but the weather says it’s still summer. It’s definitely summer at the Farms, although the transition is apparent here, too: our hot weather vegetables like tomatoes and peppers and beans are still thriving, but we’re also starting to harvest “fall” crops such as lettuce, kale, and carrots. Before fall really comes, it’s time to enjoy both!

Well, it’s that mixed time of year when many human activities suggest autumn, but the weather – and the crops – still say summer! Can you believe September is right around the corner? We hope your school year is off to a great start, if school is part of your life in any way!

Thank you to all of you who completed our mid-season survey! We want to provide as good a CSA experience as we can for you, whether you’re getting shares of vegetables, eggs, frozen broiler chickens, or a combination thereof. Your feedback and suggestions are much-appreciated and we’ll use them as we think about next year’s CSA shares. In the meantime, if you haven’t completed the survey, yet, and would like to, please do!

Also, we want to mention that this was a mid-season survey – meaning that the “summer” season is far from over! Summer Vegetables shares continue through the week of October 15th, and Summer Eggs shares run through the last week of November. Frozen Broiler Chickens shares, of course, are always available.

At the Farms, we continue with our regular chores – harvesting, cleaning, packaging, and weeding being the most prevalent! One of the items in this week’s CSA vegetables boxes will be turnip greens – we’ve been thinning our turnip plants so that the turnips themselves have a chance to grow and fill out. They’ll take another few weeks to reach maturity, but in the meantime, the greens can be enjoyed! See below for a few recipe ideas.

We’re very happy to report that a number of crops that struggled in the spring – remember when we had too much cold weather, followed too quickly by too much rain and heat? – are doing a great deal better this fall: